Castle Rouge (43 page)

The servant seated at our table did not trouble to use implements but caught both meat and vegetable up in his hands as if eating them in the field where they had been harvested.

By now Godfrey’s fevered conversations with the old man were done, and he was forced to attend to Tatyana’s comments.

Colonel Moran watched their conversational duet with unmistakable ire. Seeing Godfrey from a distance, especially looking past the peasant lump that sat two seats down from him, reacquainted me with his great physical attractions, as well as with the true nobility of his manner and expression.

My heart sank. Not only would Colonel Moran but hate Godfrey the more for his very virtues, but they would make Tatyana covet him the more.

There. I had named the greatest danger: Tatyana and her covetous infatuation with Godfrey, which I had first witnessed in Bohemia more than a year ago, but had been too thick to quite understand.

I thought back to my recent conversation with Godfrey, when I glimpsed how evil can arise out of supposed good, how love can turn to hate, how one can come to despise and destroy the very thing one most craves because that is the only way to own it forever.

Tatyana, I saw, desired to own Godfrey forever, perhaps because he was the one man least likely to be owned, least of all by her, unlike her fine French chef and her brutal servant and her Gypsy thugs and her half-tame heavy game hunter.

And, I saw, the game of winning Godfrey, of controlling Godfrey by coercion, would soon lose its zest. Then her game would be to see that no one else on earth could aspire to know and love him. That meant Irene, first and foremost, but it also meant myself, to whom he was the dearest brother in the world and all I had left of the one parent I had ever known, my kind and gentle dead father.

It struck my overwrought mind that the library table had stretched as long as a medieval banqueting table; that Tatyana and Godfrey and the strange old man were far figures in a crystal ball that looked equally to past and future.

I had never felt so helpless, not since I had lost my position and housing and very soul in London years before. Then Irene Adler had noticed my plight. She had plucked me from the streets of the city and into the theatrical whirl of her endless optimism.

Despite all this, I was just a dismissed Whiteley’s girl, a failed governess, an orphan, a fool who thought I had learned a thing or two of a world I did not much like in the past decade.

Would that I
were
a daredevil girl reporter, that I were Irene or a Pinkerton and could pull a cocked pistol from my pocket, could overturn the table with a flick of my wrist, could do something, anything, to change the moment and its inevitable outcome.

Somehow I found myself standing.

A chair leg had caught in my trailing robes. My abrupt motion flung the heavy chair backwards. The sound of wood smashing to the stone floor still reverberated.

Everyone, startled, stared at me: the chef, the colonel, the old man, the peasant, Godfrey, Tatyana. Even the Gypsies, whose bows were wavering into silence on their catgut strings. I myself seemed to be some vibrating string, frozen forever in making the wrong note. As usual.

I have no idea what I would have said or done next, save that I was as incensed as I have ever been in my life. Then the wild screech of a single Gypsy violin echoed to the high stone ceiling like a animal in its death throes…like a woman screaming in a back alley in Whitechapel or Paris or the Old Town of Prague.

How eerily a violin can evoke the human voice! This one ran up and down the scale of inhuman agony until other tortured chords joined it. Finally the tempo picked up, and the atonal racket of tattered vocal cords became a raucous, unfettered melody reeling around the huge room.

Someone seized the fallen chair behind me and swept it away. I felt the tug on my train as a cat might a pull on its tail.

Before I could turn to look, Colonel Moran was standing before me, his bare hand extended. “A dance,” he said, not asking, but ordering.

I looked immediately to Godfrey, who had risen to my defense.

The awful Tatyana was standing, too, making herself his dancing partner even as I was pulled into the room’s empty center by the spy once known as Tiger.

It was a wild waltz we embarked upon. I had never done more than take a sedate turn around the schoolroom with my older girl charges.

Now I was the center of a maelstrom, whirled in a constant eddy of music and motion by the naked hand of Colonel Sebastian Moran at the waist of my gown.

Godfrey had not been given time to don his gloves after dining, like a gentleman, either. Tatyana’s hand rested in his bare palm, and he had no choice but to pilot her through the great galloping steps of a frantic waltz.

At least Godfrey set the pace and direction in his enforced dance. I was swept to and fro, the room spinning around me like the panorama building I had been so anxious to see at the world exhibition in Paris and that also had been my swift undoing.

Worse, my unbound hair slapped my face like both blindfold and whip. I remembered playing an inadvertent game of Blind Man’s Buff with Allegra’s Uncle Quentin a decade before and wished I were in his gentle hands here instead of the relentless grip of the Colonel, who was staring at me with bulging eyes, his teeth set in a fierce gated grin.

All the while the only music was the grinding and wailing of the cursed violins and the dull chime of a few listless tambourines.

I could see Tatyana playing a trick I had witnessed before, pulling the pins from her hair as she danced until it was as loose as a Gypsy girl’s. Like mine.

Before I had been frightened. Now I was mortified. I glimpsed the old man and the dwarf sitting alone at the table as I was spun past again and again.

This was worse than my captivity in the box, for then I had been drugged into submission. Here I was to be danced to death.

The music stopped without warning.

The Colonel released me as suddenly.

I still swung, like a bell on a rope, and finally stopped, watching the floor spin beneath my feet, afraid to look up and see the chamber rotating like a top seen from the inside out.

I heard a pair of hands clapping.

“Medved!” Tatyana cried. “Dance, Medved, dance! Play, fools, play!”

Just as I heard shuffling footsteps approach, the violins leaped into bow-bending action again. I swear the bagpipes of Scotland are as melodious as a flute compared to Gypsy violins in a frenzy.

Bare, hot hands seized my left hand and my waist. I jerked my head up, fighting the dizziness, glaring at the Colonel…and saw instead the inhuman hulk of a servant Tatyana had invited to swill among us like a hog.

Bits of soup and meat dotted the front of his crude shirt. His dark and dirty brown hair was an uncombed tangle far worse than mine. I felt my gorge rising before he even jerked me left and then right in a bearlike pantomime of a waltz.

The moment reminded me so much of the awful, seasick instants inside the nautical panorama, when the sweet thick scent and taste of chloroform masked my mouth and the demented killer James Kelly had come staggering toward me with his mad eyes gleaming with unholy light….

This brute servant’s eyes held that selfsame mad gleam, as intent as two candle flames burning blue with intensity.

At least he did not whirl me in tight, swooning circles as Tiger had. He stomped first left, then right, dragging me with him, his huge boots pinning my hem to the floor now and then and threatening to topple me over in a heap.

I tried to slip out of his hot-handed grip, and it would loosen for a moment as he stared down at his booted feet as if they belonged to someone other.

“Dance, Medved, dance!” Tatyana urged from some unseen distance.

The violins rose higher and higher in some frantic Gypsy tune.

The oaf suddenly put both hands at my waist and lumbered us around and around.

Then he stopped, let me go, let me stagger backwards a few steps and leaped to capture me again. This time there was no semblance of a dance. He was grinning and nodding, lifting my hair from my neck, his greasy hands touching my unprotected skin, pushing the neckline of my gown down, fumbling at the front of my bodice as if I should accept it.

Again I was back in the panorama, trapped and mauled, sinking into a sleep that had lasted almost a week.

No! My arms lifted up and out, not so much to strike him as to ward off evil.

The gesture surprised him. He began laughing and made to push closer.

I heard a terrible crash, metal clattering and glass shattering. Tatyana’s raucous laughter echoed like an out-of-tune aria performed by a banshee.

Another hand seized mine, spun me, drove me almost to the end of my wits. I was so tired of being on a planet that turned like a top at every opportunity.

Godfrey had me in his dancerlike grip and slowly stepped into the pattern of a box waltz. We moved back and forth like Austrian automatons, scribing a docile square on the stones underfoot.

The lead Gypsy violin descended the scale, slowing as it went until it was dragging out a mocking slow-motion waltz. There were no turns, no gallops, just step side-back side-front. One-two, three-four, like a march of very tired soldiers.

Gradually, my vertigo faded. The funereal pace of the violins calmed my racing heart. I kept my gaze on Godfrey’s calm gray eyes, on the slight smile on his lips.

Without my noticing it, he maneuvered me back to the table again, and pulled away when I was close enough to rest my trembling hands on the wood and stand long enough for him to retrieve my chair and seat me.

“You English call that a dance?” Tatyana taunted. “Come, Medved. We shall show them a dance.”

She led the revolting servant onto the floor, his hand still grasping the neck of a pottery jar he swigged from again and again.

Godfrey was less interested in Tatyana and her untrained ape than in Colonel Moran, whom he finally spotted sitting in his own former chair. So he leaned against the table beside me and cast a comforting glance my way.

I was glad to be off my feet and anchored once again, but I did turn in my chair to watch the exhibition Tatyana was about to make of herself with her “Medved.”

She had been a ballerina, or so she had claimed when we had first encountered her in Prague. Ballerinas were such ethereal, graceful creatures that it was hard to imagine this woman of fire and earthy contempt ever emulating a dying swan.

Now she mimicked some Gypsy fandango, circling around her drunken swain, shaking her coarse, flowing blond hair at him, leading him close to her, then leaping back to let him founder.

He was openly reaching for her now with huge, greedy hands. I shuddered to picture those grimy fingers on my neck and shoulder and knew I should have to rub my skin raw in my room tonight to banish the memory. Grasping hands. What had they done to me during the days and nights I was drugged? Was this ghastly man among the retinue then, free to rummage about my person?

The lack of memory was maddening! I would never know what had happened to me, or what had not. My teeth started chattering, but couldn’t be heard over the violins, which were keeping pace with the drunken lumberings of the great uncouth fool in the center of the room.

Tatyana danced at him like a teasing blade in a duel, drawing him forward, then driving him back. After a few minutes of this, the creature finally toppled over, bottle clasped in his hand, like some traveling company Caliban drunk almost to death on Prospero’s island that had once been his.

Laughing, Tatyana leaped over his fallen body and came striding toward us.

She shook her unbound hair like a mane. “Your business is done here,” she told Godfrey. “Take the little Englishwoman upstairs to her room. At least you did not marry such a milksop as this. Go!”

Godfrey shepherded me away and out into the entrance rooms of the castle.

The revelers slumped in their chairs or on the floor, except for the thin old man, who remained oddly erect in his seat. The violins played on, more slowly and fainter. Medved slumbered like a fallen Satan in the center of the room, his unbroken bottle beside an outflung hand, leaking liquid that darkened the stones like blood.

I didn’t speak until we were making our weary way up the grand stone staircase, Godfrey’s hand supporting my elbow while I dragged my heavy skirts up riser after riser.

“What did she want? What was the purpose of such a travesty of a dinner?” I asked him.

“For one thing, the old man was Count Lupescu, who owns this forest and its castle. It was my assignment to purchase the lot for the Rothschilds.”

“So it was legitimate business you did here?”

“If that old fellow was really Lupescu and he really does own this estate. Madame Tatyana is quite capable of stocking the castle with her own cast of characters, all serving her whim and her twisted sense of amusement, as we do.”

“We serve her? I do not!”

“We are prisoners, of course. We dance to her tune, as the evening demonstrated quite literally.”

“Godfrey, I have been thinking of Irene.”

An expression of pain crossed his face. “It may be better not to do that until we have put this place behind us. We must escape before she is lured into following us here. She is the true target of this elaborate plot.”

“Why?”

“Because she is Irene, and Tatyana is not.”

“That is cryptic.”

“A woman like Tatyana is driven by all she is not.”

“Not a dancer anymore, but Irene isn’t a singer anymore.”

“Tatyana is also not active in the Great Game as she knew it anymore; she must create her own game.”

“The Great Game. You mean all the European nations fighting over bits and pieces of India and the Orient, that Quentin has been drawn into for so many years?”

“The Great Game is one nation trying to control another and another and another. Tatyana regards herself as a nation unto herself, and she will try to control anyone who crosses her path, or who she can trap into her path.”

“Why would she be so evil?”

“Because it is easier than trying to be good.”